Screening Communities: Negotiating Narrativesyr of Empire, Nation, and the Cold Warop in Hong Kong Cinema

Hong Kong Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021) 32 pleads Hong Kong to “light a lamp while there is even one breath” and remembers the unyielding Lion Rock spirit (199). As a leading scholar and the director of the Hong Kong Studies Program the University of Hong Kong, Chu’s book stands as a significant text for the development of an interdisciplinary Hong Kong studies in the inevitable process of transition and in the age of China that is ls impossible to ignore. To locate Hong Kong amidst a time a ri of change, the people must value their culture with the te blessings of the past and venture together toward the a M future of their city and home. d te h ig Screening Communities: Negotiating Narrativesyr of Empire, Nation, and the Cold Warop in Hong Kong Cinema. By Chang Jingjing. HongC Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. 246 pp. Hardcover.s: ISBN: 9781349949311. es Pr Reviewed by Mitchell Ma and Mira Chow ng Hong Kong cinema has often beeno lauded as an important K symbol of the city’s uniqueg identity. Known for its slapstick comedies and kungfuon action films from the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong H cinema gives people the false impression of an apoliticalof fantasy world. While there is ample research yon Hong Kong cinema from the 1970s onward, the periodit before this time has often been rs overlookedv.e Screening Communities by Chang Jingjing challengenis the apolitical image and addresses this gap by examining U the role of Hong Kong cinema in shaping the localse community during the 1950s and 1960s, a crucial transitionalne period in Hong Kong’s history which saw its hitransformation from an entrepot port of trade to an C industrialized metropolis. he At the onset of the 1950s, Hong Kong was still T recovering from the ashes of war and the population consisted mainly of refugees and recent migrants from mainland China, who have little sense of belonging with the colony. To them, Hong Kong was a temporary shelter Hong Kong Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021) 33 and their loyalty remained with the Chinese nation. As Hong Kong gradually prospered, more people treated the city as a permanent home, leading to the increasing sense of local identity and belonging. Although there was a consensus among scholars that a distinct local Hong Kong identity emerged in the late 1960s, scholars still contend on the how and why of its emergence. In Screening ls communities, Chang moves beyond singular events and a ri examined the reciprocal relationship between Hong Kong te cinema and the local identity across time. a M Chang interprets Hong Kong cinema as a catalyst ford rebranding the Hong Kong identity to one grounded int ethe local experience. The construction of Hong Kong cinemah ig was deeply enmeshed in socio-political contextsyr peculiar to Hong Kong as a British colony in China duringop the Cold War, which evolved through negotiationsC between the colonial government, film producers : and the local ss audience. Ultimately, Screening Communitiesre proposes that the cinema entails more than P just narratives and images, but also places and experiencesg that allow one to introspect the values of the societyn that consumes it. The book consists of an introduction,o six chapters and K a coda. The chapters are ggrouped into three parts; each part consists of two chapterson focused on a specific theme and divided into subtopics.f H The first part examines the colonial government’s o stance on film culture. In the first chapter, Changt yillustrates how Hong Kong’s regulatory bodies do nots ifit the conventional narrative of the Cold er War. She isuggestsv that the colonial regime was reluctant to be engagedn in Cold War politics due to the colony’s U precariouse position as a British enclave off the coast of Communistes China. As such, keeping a balance of power ibetweenn competing factions to maintain political and h social stability within the colony took priority above all C e else. This complex balance is best exemplified through the h film censorship debates during the September 1965 Press T Incident between the colonial government, pro- communist supporters and pro-nationalist sympathizers. Film censorship in Cold War Hong Kong was, in short, more than just a top–down implementation of policies in Hong Kong Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021) 34 society, but an evolving construction of Hong Kong’s collective viewing audiences. Chapter 2 focuses on the “official film” culture of Hong Kong. Chang argues that official films, aside from being tools of propaganda, were more than an indoctrination of information from the regime above, but “a negotiated site where the Hong Kong’s community was screened to local ls and global audiences” (70). The colonial regime used film a ri to display its prestige and efficient governing, although it te was acutely aware of its precarious status as colonial rulers a M when the world was undergoing decolonization. Thed regime must demonstrate the ability to adapt tande transform its relationship with the Hong Kong populatioh n, ig international allies such as the US, and the Communistyr Chinese regime in a changing time. Althoughop the Hong Kong Film Unit (HKFU), the film productionC unit during colonial times, continued to be influenced: by colonial ss assumptions that its local audience werere unsophisticated and could be easily manipulated, P it increasingly considered the receptiveness gof its audience when producing and circulating itsn productions, evident through its effort to promoteo official films in local K neighborhoods and integratingg themes and subjects that were familiar to the Chineseon majority population. By doing so, the HKFU madef itsH audience an active collaborator in crafting depictions o of Hong Kong. Official films, therefore, became an importy tant lens through which to view the gradual transformationsi of the government’s discourse on er Hong Kongiv society and its relationship with its citizens. Part n2 examines the construction of what Chang refers U to ase a leftist brand of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong. Ine Chapters 3, Chang studies the legacy of the May Fourth iMovementn in the context of postwar Hong Kong cinema, h and points out that following the Chinese Civil War in 1949, C e Hong Kong gradually replaced Shanghai as a center for h Chinese film production because many film workers fled T the mainland into Hong Kong. Many of these film workers were influenced by the May Fourth Movement, an intellectual and cultural movement that sought to revitalize the Chinese nation through socio-political Hong Kong Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021) 35 reforms. They believed art should not be divorced from politics, and believed in the power of cinema to educate their audience on Chinese nationalism. While colonial authorities prohibited overt display of politics, these film workers eluded censorship by depoliticizing the May Fourth Spirit and focused on subtler messages such as gender equality and free love, as demonstrated in the ls Torrents Trilogy 激流三部曲 (1953–1954) based on the ia er May Fourth author Ba Jin’s 巴金 work. These films at galvanized the audience against values of traditional M Chinese culture such as patriarchy and obedience. Theyed avoided being censored by embracing humanism,ht an important aspect of the May Fourth Movement thatig did not contradict the colonial regime’s stance. By remodelingyr the May Fourth Spirit for Hong Kong, these ofilmp workers constructed a brand of Chinese nationalism: C through Hong Kong screens that differed from the politicizedss rhetoric of May Fourth promoted by their counterpartsre in Taiwan and mainland China. P Chapter 4 focuses on the evolvingng genre of lunlipian (social ethics film 倫理片), commono in Hong Kong in the K 1950s and 1960s and promotedg values that aligned with the May Fourth Spirit.o nChang contends that while the genre seemingly declined H in popularity in the mid-1960s, its influence lingeroedf . Specifically, while many new genres such as horror yand suspense thrillers came to replace lunlipian in theit market due to changing tastes and rs demands vofe the audience, these emerging genres containedni strong elements of social ethics and familial dynamics U that were fundamental in lunlipian and could constitutese as variants of lunlipian in their own right. As thene definition of the genre shifted over time, Chang argues hiwe cannot precisely pinpoint its rise and fall. Instead, C lunlipian evolved due to market demands and had a more he enduring impact on the Hong Kong cinematic landscape. T The final part of the book examines the rhetoric of citizenship and gendered labor through the silver screen. Chapter 5 explores the role of Nanyang (Southeast Asia) in the construction of postwar Hong Kong identity. Chang Hong Kong Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 2021) 36 seeks to reconfigure readers’ understanding of Nanyang from the 1950s and 1960s not simply as a potential market but also as a trope where rhetoric and discourses of Chinese citizenship and heritage were constructed and reimagined. In these films, narratives of transnational migration often reinforced a paternalistic sense of belonging to the Chinese homeland; for example, Hong ls Kong was often depicted as the homeland while Nanyang a ri was portrayed as a periphery of Chinese culture that te needed to be civilized and modernized. Although Nanyang a M gradually faded as a trope in the mid-1960s, its ethosd remained to represent the Chinese overseas experiencete and shaped the cinematic projections of identitiesh in ig postwar Hong Kong. This provided viewers a ynewfoundr appreciation for being Chinese in Hong Kongo andp abroad. Whilst Chapter 5 looks at the cross-borderC experience, Chapter 6 examines the local experience: through the ss intersection of gender roles and celebrityre culture.

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